This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order
presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution
to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about
permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Cycle of Lies by Juliet Macur: review

RC

By Robert Collison

Wed., March 5, 2014timer3 min. read

If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a “Big Lie” was the advice of one of history’s biggest villains and it was a lesson that the disgraced cycling superstar Lance Armstrong doubtless learned early. That is the conclusion drawn by journalist Juliet Macur in her riveting account of Armstrong’s implosion in her book, Cycle of Lies, The Fall of Lance Armstrong. And the portrait she paints of the legendary cyclist who won seven Tours de France (with the help of a stash of performance-enhancing drugs) isn’t pretty. Bully, cheat, narcissist, user are the appetizers. Cancer survivor, of course. But most of all, the Armstrong, portrayed here is a world-class liar. Cycle of Lies reads like a case study in the “pathology of dissemblance,” and Armstrong is Exhibit A.

In It’s Not About the Bike, the autobiography he wrote chronicling his surviving cancer and winning the Tour de France, Armstrong writes, “Doping is an unfortunate fact of life in cycling, or any other performance sport for that matter. Inevitably, some riders feel it’s like nuclear weapons — they have to do it to stay competitive. I never felt that way, and certainly after chemo the idea of putting anything foreign in my body was repulsive.”

Every word is a lie — and they are lies he would repeat over and over again so successfully that he completely “snowed” most of the media pack covering him. As Macur notes, “Journalists had asked him repeatedly if he doped and he always rebutted them with such conviction that it seemed impossible he was lying.”

So “Why did he do it?” is clearly the first question begging for an answer. And “How did he get away with it for so long?” is another. Macur investigates both exhaustively and the result is a tale right out of ancient Greece — the demi-god with the fatal flaw. The product of a dysfunctional Texas family that left him angry, aggressive and insecure, Armstrong early displayed athletic prowess, unbridled ambition and ability to charm those who might be useful to him. But the book also contains countless cases of his abandonment of those no longer useful. At his first mentor’s funeral, an indifferent Armstrong tells the man’s daughter, “I don’t do funerals.” Writes Macur, “She stood there amazed at his attitude and holding back tears, ‘Lance, what do you want me to say? This is not about you.’”

But that’s just the point: “It’s always about Lance.” Still, Armstrong’s narcissism took a turn for the worse after his cancer experience. As Macur writes, “Before cancer, he said, winning was nice but not essential. After the cancer, ‘I was pretty f**cking laser-focussed.’ He later expressed the focus in six words: ‘I win, I live. I lose, I die.’”

Unfortunately, there were obstacles to his becoming a “winner,” a lot of his competitors were using drugs — and Lance wasn’t. So when did Armstrong go over to the “dark side”? Macur dates it to “March 17, 1995, when on the way home from Milan-San Remo — where he’d finished 73rd — Armstrong grumbled to a longtime friend, ‘This is bullshit, people are using stuff. We’re getting killed.’”

So Lance Armstrong got some help: blood transfusions, EPOs, calf’s blood, steroids, cortisone, testosterone, etc. And he doped on an “industrial scale” with CIA-style security. “The systemization of it gave Armstrong’s team the edge,” argues cyclist Jonathan Vaughters. “Other teams had one or two guys doping, nobody but Armstrong had every top guy on a sophisticated plan.” Adds Macur, “Armstrong treated cycling like a serious business of which he was the boss. A lot of money was at stake. . . Lance was pulling in tens of millions of dollars.”

More from The Star & Partners

More Entertainment

Top Stories

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All
rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto
Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of
Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com